Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

stood in the doorway, hands on hips to make himself look bigger, eyebrows lowered to add to his threat level. All textbook stuff. ‘Wakey wakey, Hill. Your lawyer’s here for a conference.’
    He understood the words but they made no sense. ‘I’ve got a lawyer?’
    ‘Don’t you bloody start. I’ve had enough from her end. If you didn’t have a lawyer, she wouldn’t be in the interview room asking me to produce you, would she?’
    Paula. She must have ignored him and decided to sort him out with a lawyer regardless. It wouldn’t hurt to sit down in a more comfortable room and tell them that he really didn’t need legal representation now he’d worked out how to explain the key evidence against him. Still, it would pass some time. So he unfolded his legs and stood up. He picked up his jacket and tried to put it on both arms at once, like Martin Sheen always did in The West Wing . As usual, he got into a tangle. It needed more practice, that was all. He caught the eye of the custody sergeant, who was struggling not to laugh. ‘A man needs a hobby,’ Tony said, stepping gratefully out of the cell into the corridor. He was about to head for the counter where he’d emptied his pockets earlier, but the sergeant blocked his path, directing him towards a door that stood ajar at the end of the corridor.
    Feeling surprisingly jaunty, Tony pushed the door open. At first his brain denied what he was seeing. Bronwen Scott, he accepted that. She was the sort of person he’d expected to see. But the blonde head facing away from the door – it couldn’t be. He was hallucinating. Or delusional. Then she turned her head and something inside him lurched and twisted. The ground beneath his feet seemed to tilt and he stumbled. ‘Carol?’ His voice held a mixture of wonder and doubt. So much for cutting her out of his heart. Apparently his heart hadn’t got the message.
    ‘You’ve got an hour,’ Sergeant Fowler grunted as he closed the door firmly behind him.
    Bronwen Scott got to her feet and greeted him with a wide smile. ‘Dr Hill. I didn’t expect to encounter you in circumstances like this, but we’ll have this sorted out in no time at all.’
    He ignored her and walked round to the far side of the table like a sleepwalker. ‘Carol?’ He grabbed the back of the chair for support and subsided into it. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to confirm that he wasn’t lost in some psychotic break.
    Carol pushed her hair off her forehead, her eyes flinty, her face forbidding. ‘I’m not here for you. I’m here because Paula knows how stupid you can be. You need Bronwen to get you out of this mess. Otherwise more women will die. If you’d thought about something other than yourself for five minutes, you would have understood that. So don’t fool yourself that you’re the big draw tonight. I’m here for Paula and for justice and for the women whose names we don’t even know.’
    Right then, he didn’t care why she was there. All that mattered was that they were sitting in the same room again. The edifice he’d built to protect himself from his feelings for her was already a crumbling ruin. How could he have considered for a moment the possibility of excising her from his life? It was like rediscovering a limb he’d been managing without. A limb he’d thought amputated for ever. He couldn’t keep the grin from his face, even in the teeth of her unflinching glare.
    He was aware that Bronwen Scott was speaking but he had nothing to spare for her. He drank in every detail, checking it against the mental checklist he hadn’t even known he’d been keeping. Her hair was styled differently – the lines more blunt, the shagginess thinned out more. The lines around her eyes were deeper, the new traces in her face from sorrow rather than laughter. Her shoulders seemed broader, the seams of her jacket straining slightly where before there had been ample room for a shrug. She’d always been self-contained; now she was like a door slammed in his face.
    ‘Dr Hill?’ Scott had raised her voice and finally penetrated. ‘We don’t have long. I need your version of events so we can set about getting you out of here.’
    ‘And finding out who killed those two women,’ Carol said.
    ‘That’s not my job,’ Scott said briskly. ‘And actually, Carol, it’s not your job any more either.’
    Tony found his voice. ‘Maybe not, but I’d put my money on Carol without resources ahead of Alex Fielding and her